Is There a Meteor Shower Tonight?

What is a meteor shower?

A meteor shower happens when Earth passes through the trail of dust a comet has left behind on its orbit.^[22] The grains, called meteoroids while they are still in space, hit the upper atmosphere at tens of kilometers a second and burn up, and the glowing streak is the meteor, or shooting star. Almost all of the material vaporizes; the rare piece that survives and lands is a meteorite. Every Perseid, for example, is a tiny fragment of comet Swift-Tuttle, which passes the sun every 135 years.^[22] A few showers come from asteroids instead: the Geminids from 3200 Phaethon.^[23]

Where to look

All the meteors of one shower seem to fly out of one point in the sky, the radiant, which gives the shower its name: the Perseids come from Perseus, the Geminids from Gemini. That doesn't mean you should stare at it. Meteors appear all over the sky, and the ones far from the radiant have the longest trails. Look at the darkest part of the sky, about halfway up, and take in as much of it as you can. NASA's advice for the Geminids works for every shower: get well away from city and street lights, lie flat on your back, and give your eyes about 30 minutes to adapt to the dark.^[23] Our sunrise and sunset page shows when the sky gets truly dark where you are. Don't look at your phone in between: its light resets your night vision.

Why the best time is usually after midnight

Two things work together. After midnight you are on the side of Earth that faces forward as the planet moves along its orbit, so it runs into more of the dust, the way a car's windshield catches more rain than the rear window. And for most showers the radiant climbs higher during the night, so fewer meteors are hidden below the horizon. That's why our night charts usually peak in the hours before dawn. The Geminids are an exception: their radiant is already well up by mid-evening, so they are worth watching from about 9 or 10 p.m.^[23]

Why you see fewer meteors than the headlines say

News stories quote the zenithal hourly rate (ZHR): the number one observer would see in an hour with the radiant directly overhead and a perfect sky showing stars down to magnitude 6.5.^[20] Real nights are never that good. The radiant is lower, there is haze or moonlight, and most of us live under skies that hide the fainter stars. The Geminids' ZHR is 150, but in 2026 the best hour from a suburb of New York brings about 35. That's why we give two numbers, for the suburbs and for a dark site, and an animation of what each sky looks like.

Meteor showers from the Southern Hemisphere

A shower's radiant sits at a fixed point among the stars, so how high it gets depends on your latitude. The Perseids' radiant is far in the northern sky: at their 2026 peak a dark site near London could see about 92 an hour, while near Sydney the radiant never rises above the horizon at night, so hardly any appear. The Eta Aquariids, debris from Halley's Comet, work the other way: in 2026 about 9 an hour near Sydney against 2 near London, because their radiant climbs high before dawn in the south and only just clears the horizon in Britain. The Geminids are the best shower for both hemispheres.

How we calculate

Peak times, radiants, speeds and rates come from the International Meteor Organization's working list of meteor showers.^[20] Each shower peaks when the sun reaches the same position along Earth's orbit every year, so we calculate the date from the sun's position; our 2026 and 2027 peak times agree with the IMO calendars to within 45 minutes.^[21] For your city we work through the night in 10-minute steps: how high the radiant is, where the moon is and how bright it is, and how dark your sky is, then scale the ZHR down using the IMO's formula. Away from the peak night we assume activity falls off steadily, halving roughly every day and a half (much faster for the Quadrantids, whose peak lasts a few hours). Real showers don't follow one curve, so treat all numbers as a guide. City data come from GeoNames.^[37]